Feral
by calyxofawildflower
Summary: Lovers Morgan Pendleton and Esma Boyle meet at Pendleton Hall for an afternoon of hunting.


"You must come to my manor and see the new wolfhounds," he had rasped to her in her bed with his fingers digging into her throat, "they tore two foxes to pieces just last week."

It was a month—the Month of Ice—before Esma Boyle's riverboat brought her to the Pendleton estate, past Dunwall's borders and to the gray countryside of Gristol in winter. Pendleton Hall stood squat and square upon the expanse of their lands, another generation of its name presiding over the red-stone walls that rose in crenelated imposition upon the landscape. Wide fields wound around the manor, enclosed by centuries-old, low stone walls that marked their hunting grounds. The trees, bare branches clotted with nests, had already been stripped of their hard, black bark by the starveling deer grown lean and famished in the winter months. Rabbits, nestled between the roots of evergreens, slept fitfully in their shallow warrens. The lords of this manor would hunt them for sport. Trapped at the pleasure of the Pendletons, the game wandered the grounds and tore clumps of dead grass dug out from beneath the fresh sheets of snow, waiting for the spring that would fatten them again. A little stream ran fitfully through the woods but had grown sullen and thick with the season, its banks sharpened by ice.

Beneath the pointed horns of long-dead trophies Custis Pendleton caressed with an oil-soaked rag the wide, carved barrel of his pistol. Morgan, quiet, simply paced the room. Black glass eyes stared down from their stretched skins in rows above the hunting frieze an ancestor had commissioned; wide-mouthed hounds circling a stag, biting at its bleeding legs while the great beast's horns tangled in the branches of a tree. Helpless, it watched as it was devoured alive.

"Keep in mind that every whore you beat within an inch of her life is money you've pissed away," Morgan snapped.

His brother only saw his own reflection in the metal as he aimed the pistol at the far wall, the paneling riddled with staggering bullet holes. The sound rung out, hard and high-pitched, and another blistering pockmark appeared in an explosion of splinters.

"Listen to me!" Morgan crossed to Custis as he lowered his weapon. He stared back at the hard mirror of his brother's face.

"You've invited Esma Boyle to our manor for a round of rabbiting and you're criticising me for wasting money on a whore?"

"Oh, I see." Morgan said, turning on his heel as he straightened again the high collar that scratched uncomfortably at his neck.

"There was no need to invite her here," Custis said, "you could have waited for the Boyles' next idiotic party to fuck her. Are you that desperate?"

Custis raised his gun at the wall and imagined, briefly, a woman's face at the end of the barrel. Morgan crossed to him and smacked his brother's weapon down.

"Find something else to do before you destroy all the mouldings in the house."

Custis replied in a low snarl and flung the antique gun into the cushions of the armchair and walked off, the large oak doors closing briskly behind him. Morgan watched him as he left, then picked the lethal instrument from its place, the metal warm in his hands, and stuck it back upon its setting on the mantle between two mounted animals in a perpetual rictus of a snarl. Twin pistols, commissioned a generation ago from a Tyvian gunsmith, which faced each other perpetually down their barrels engraved with the ornate monograph of their family name—Custis always used the same one when frustration spurred him to destroy something beautiful.

The door stirred, and Morgan turned to face it.

"Lady Boyle, my Lord," a servant said, and bowed. Morgan adjusted the rings that strained around his fingers and nodded.

"Bring her here." The servant left him, Morgan turning to straighten the carafe of wine on its platter. The stench of sulphur still lingered in the air, the more ephemeral vestige of Custis's shooting. He lit a cigarette and blew an impetuous cloud of smoke to the painted ceiling.

"Lord Pendleton." Esma stepped into the room, waving away her fawning lady's maid who watched with an over-curious eye as the door closed behind her mistress.

"Esma," he answered. Her cheeks and neck were flushed from the cold, the column of her throat rising from the snow-colored fan of a high collar, a recent fashion since the Empress had worn hers similarly at court. Her tall boots were mottled by melting snow. He took her hand, his touch impeded by her oxskin gloves, and gave a shallow greeting.

"The Wrenhaven's nearly frozen over, you'd do best to move back into the city before you're closed off completely." She stepped past him to stand by the fire, the gold charm that curled her hair into a knot glinting in the light.

"Hosting another party?" Morgan took a seat behind her, pouring himself a glass from the pointed decanter. He snubbed his half-finished cigarette in the ashtray upon the table. Esma turned to glance at him over the sharp slope of her shoulder, her eyes lit by the cold light of the midwinter sun that came through the windows. She smiled. The air around her flickered.

"Not all of us have such delightful hunting grounds. We have to make our own, wherever we are." She lit a cigarette of her own and smoke curled from her nostrils to play against the ceiling's gilded paneling.

"Of course," he said. His eyes slid away from her body. "Have you been to a rabbiting before?"

"Lord Boyle used to enjoy his hare coursing," she said dryly, and moved to sit beside him.

"You'll find this quite different." He leaned forward to take up the decanter and pour her a glass. She watched him, her eyes trailing the length of his arm. He settled back into his seat and laced his fingers together.

Esma dragged hard at her cigarette, steadying herself. Her mind, as always, swam fitfully from her morning refreshments.

"My Uncle—the one who married the Inchmouth heiress–used to own four magnificent wolfhounds. He used to hunt us, as a game. My sisters and I would go off to lay the trail, and he'd follow the hounds on horseback. He caused quite a stir in the village," she laughed, "they were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after three little girls."

Morgan's eyes settled on her throat. "Shall I have my hounds hunt you, then?"

"Oh, Morgan," she said airily, a thread of laughter in her voice, "they'd be no replacement." She dropped ash into a crystal tray. "You know I've always liked to watch you at the hunt. You have such finesse." Her words were laced with breathy smoke. She took up her wine, cradling the round of the glass in her palm. "No matter which part you take up."

Dead eyes watched from the walls as Morgan reached across the small stretch of space between them and grasped her neck in his free hand. The other leisurely rolled the wine in its glass; it could have been tender, had his nails not dug into her white flesh and his gaze not remained as hard as those of the beasts above them. Her heart fluttered even as her teeth bared in a smile. His hand dropped as he took another drink of wine.

"My goodness, what happened here?" She pointed to the ruined panelling. Morgan rolled his eyes.

"Custis had a tantrum."

"Oh, what shall we do with him? At least Waverly has the decency to lock herself in her room when she's in a mood."

"Don't talk about Custis," he said shortly. Esma hid her smile behind the rim of her glass. Morgan tipped his own back and poured the vintage down his waiting tongue.

"They will be ready for us at the warren soon," he said, rising. She followed, leaving her glass on the table, putting out her cigarette against the glazed, bulbous eye of the stuffed fox that crouched upon the fireplace's mantle.

Their servants had slipped downstairs and so the pair walked through the cold hall alone, lit only by the light of a sun slung low by season. It came in slatted bars across the floor tiles, flashing in their steps. Morgan lead her, walking with long, stiff strides as she came after with a practiced step that did not dip too far left or right even as the room swayed.

"My, look at these," she said as they came into the next hall. Portraiture lined one wall, spaced by sconces which flickered and cast odd shadows over the brushstrokes. One had been painted on a young lord's deathbed, a last attempt at preservation, his face forced into a hollow smile, his cheeks reddened in the simulation of life. His brother, his successor, sat beside him in his own portrait, poised, dark eyes gleaming as though the paint had not yet dried, his long fingers laced together over his knee. Another, earlier, a brother and sister stood too closely, touched too intimately at their hands at shoulders in their long coats which were the fashions of the time. Each somber face seemed to stare irrevocably to the sordid end of their line who stood with hard eyes staring back.

"My late father, the General." Morgan gestured halfheartedly to the nearest painting where a man sat hunched with a young slip of a wife who placed her delicate hands on his shoulder. "And stepmother. She told him to burn the earlier portrait, the one with our mother, and Custis and I as infants." He looked away as Esma's fingertips brushed against his collar. "He always gave in to that woman's whims."

"And now you," Esma said, gesturing with her other hand to the wide canvas beside it, "and your brothers."

"I shall perhaps burn this one," he said, squinting at his own rendered half-smile, "or my heirs will, in time."

"Your heirs?" Her voice came close. He snatched the hand that played at the curve of his ear with idle fingertips; pausing for a moment, his black eyes were fixed upon his own image.

"I imagine Custis would eat his children, like a distempered rat." His gaze shifted and he released her. "But Treavor? He would cut down the family tree to make our coffins. He'd ruin the entire Pendleton name before he would extend it."

"And you?" Her eyes were sharp. Morgan turned to look at her, standing amid the excesses of his lineage, more than enough already mingled with Boyle blood. He let out a short laugh, a bark that echoed down the hall on the painted lips of his forebears.

"Why do you think I fuck you, and not your sisters?"

"Oh? I really hadn't given it much thought," she said. "I imagine for the same reason I fuck you and not your twin."

"I should have Custis fuck you. It might teach you a lesson." Morgan said. She laughed, her eyes locked with his, as Morgan came beside her to clutch at her waist. Esma placed one hand at his shoulder while the other splayed flat against his chest.

"He wouldn't have the nerve." The words hissed into his ear; instantly he drew back and rang his palm across her cheek. She brought shivering fingertips to her flesh, blanched and stinging, but dropped her arms when he gripped tight with both his hands at the edges of her pale face.

"He wouldn't." She said again. Her fingers found the clasps of his jacket and pulled them open, drawing her palms over the embroidered fabric of his waistcoat. He put his mouth over hers; she sucked at his lower lip. With an arrogant hand on her shoulder he turned her and, his fingers edging to grasp firmly at the nape of her neck, walked her down the hall under the dark, preening eyes of a dozen long-dead Pendletons.

Once in his room she turned and kissed him imperiously. He pushed her away, her eyes narrowing to a sharp point as he dragged his coat from his shoulders and pulled the cufflinks from the sleeves of his silken shirt. Now he approached her, rolling his sleeves to his elbows like a butcher approaching a cut of meat on the slab. She unstuck the jewel at his throat and slipped his cravat from around his neck, dropping it to the floor; it dug into the carpet by his boot. He snatched up both her wrists in one hand and kissed her. She felt his teeth, his hard, insistent tongue—she tensed to match his vehemence. He slapped her again, his palm cracking against her cheek.

He flung her to his ancestral bed where he and his brothers had been conceived, tearing the buttons of his waistcoat from their settings as he dragged it from his shoulders. He wrapped his fingers around her neck and pressed her down; he sought to overwhelm her, his strangled cock beneath the layers of his trousers pressing insistently into the fork of her thighs, her starched collar bent under his body, her arms splayed across the wide, heavy brocade of the bedspread.

His desire washed over her and pulled away the remainder of their fine clothes—the shirts of Pandyssian silk, the trousers embroidered with gold thread—until they faced one another in their accustomed indecency. Esma reached back and unlaced the heavy corsetry that caged her. She had tied a thick silk cord around her body, beneath her breasts; unknotting it, she pulled it taut between her hands. After a moment he simply bent his head and she looped the rope around his neck and pulled the makeshift collar tight. Her skin was mottled with lines it had cut into her beneath her clothing. Dragging his head back, she tied his wrists and elbows with the same lead and pinned them to his sides, then finally knotted his knees together. He lay prone, twisting at the bindings, his throat exposed as he gasped. She left him trussed upon the bed and returned only to tie his discarded cravat around his eyes. It blotted out the winter light and Morgan groaned in this new darkness.

The savor of wine and acrid flowers came with her as she drew near, her perfume betraying her as she paced about the bed, enjoying the privilege of sight. His flesh pricked with cold until he felt her tongue along his taut throat, his sallow chest, the cusp of his hip. He could not reach out to touch her or himself. His cock throbbed painfully. He thrashed against his bindings, against his blindness; the sound of her laugh filled the room. He responded only with inhuman growls, language crushed beneath the weight of his need as he begged for her.

He felt her hands upon his shoulders first, pushing him back against the cushions of his wide bed, then her thighs as they straddled his hips. He arched his back and pressed against her and instantly the back of her hand struck hard at his face, his cheek turned in prickling heat as he tensed to stop himself from crying out. She laughed and hit him again before she pushed him into her in one sharp movement. His moan came as a hiss through gritted teeth, then softer as she moved against him. In the slip of space between his blindfold and the bridge of his nose he watched the zoetrope of her pleasure; one of her hands worked mechanically at herself while the other grasped his shoulder as she braced her convulsions against his body.

She brought him maddeningly close. Too soon she gasped and twisted atop him and left his too-taut body aching on the bed. Only when his frantic heart had slowed and his cock fell limp against his thigh, unsatisfied, that she—dressed already—drew the cravat from his eyes and undid his bindings.

They came to the hunt disheveled, Morgan pressing back a stray lick of hair that fell continuously in his eyes, adjusting his cravat, which hid the reddening bite of her rope, while Esma smoothed repeatedly the wrinkles of her collar. The servants had cleared a path for them in the snow that lead to the crest of the far hill where the enclosed copse of trees marked the horizon. He curled and uncurled his fingers into fists as they walked, and Esma's eyes followed the lines of his stiff body, unslaked, as they walked the winding path across the field.

"The hounds are ready, my Lord," said the groundskeeper as they approached, his fists tight around the leashes of two sleek-backed wolfhounds who crouched in the snow. The other servants stood around nets which covered the strategic burrows in the stonework that encircled the trees. Morgan nodded.

The wolfhounds snarled as Esma drew close to their master, baring the serrated edges of their perfectly white teeth. Their wide, web-toed claws made deep impressions in the snow. Their noses snuffed at the ground, impatient.

"Send them in," Morgan said, waving his cream-colored glove. The hounds' handler released the beasts from their harnesses and they darted with long-limbed strides through the open gate and into the little forest.

At once their prey darted from their homes, slipping into the tangling netting that awaited them beyond the wall. They thrashed, white-rimmed eyes staring, fear-sharpened nails twisting hard at the ropes. The servants dragged the squirming mass through the snow; Morgan's coat dropped into the waiting hands of a footman. He removed his cufflinks and rolled his sleeves with the same subtle urgency as he had standing before her in his bedroom. Now he took up his club and walked with equal purpose to his prey.

The first blow sent a smatter of pink and grey across an untouched crust of snow. The animals squealed; even the hounds, enchanted by the sudden scent of blood, bayed and strained against the harnesses that bound them up once more. Morgan struck again, the tendons in his arm bulging, muscles defined by a lifetime of curling his hands into fists. Their furs matted with blood, snow smeared, the hares stilled one by one.

The servants untangled the bodies from the nets and tied their lifeless limbs together. Morgan wiped blood from his hands with a proffered rag and pulled his coat over his shoulders. His breath steamed in the air. Again he pushed back the flat lick of hair that fell before his eyes and breathed, cheeks flushed, an imperceptible streak of blood at the crease in his waistcoat collar.

Esma watched, the tips of her fingers tingling in the cold, as Morgan stilled before the snarled and helpless prey he had brought to death. The forest was quiet, the immaculate plane of flat snow extending in all directions from the scarlet, steaming pit he had made. Far above them famished crows began to circle, drawn to the kill that only the lord of the manor could enact upon the animals here. The servants gathered up the bloodied nets. One of the rabbits caught Esma's eye and she bent to pick it up.

"It's still alive," she said, holding it aloft by the matted scruff of its neck. It was blinded by its own coursing blood, its skull split and its back legs twitching wildly. Morgan crossed to her to snap its neck but before he could snatch it from her she flung its mangled body to the hounds.

They bit at each other's necks in atavistic greed as they fought for the moment's palpitation of a dying heart, pulling the squealing rabbit apart as they tugged it between them. With a nauseated voluptuousness Esma watched as its flesh spilled blood for her, sullying the pristine snow. Blue and purple viscera poured out onto the ground, the long rope of intestine coiled between the hounds' snapping teeth, its heart already speared and slit to ribbons on their fangs. The fur around their mouths was bloody as they settled to eat the pieces they had torn, dragging their claws into the snow as they pulled long strings of flesh from the delicate bones and crunched its ribs to pulp.

Morgan laid upon her hip an irrevocable hand that pulled her roughly to his side. He was impossibly warm. Nothing dying disgusted her. His touch devastated her; her heart raced then withered in the snow. The smell of meat was overwhelming. Again he lead her to his home, his hunting ground, trailing behind him the rabbits' blood that dripped from the mouths of his loyal hounds.

The trophy room held only the scent of stale tobacco. The long-dead creatures had been revived with a facsimile of life that mocked Morgan's fresh kills. The fire had burned low, untended; his hands burned against her throat as he came, again, to kiss her. He bit at her lips until she, too, tasted a metallic sweetness. With her arousal came a repugnance at the scent of him, the sweat that yellowed his collar, the spots of blood that had turned a muddy color against his shirt. Now she pushed him away but he came again, his hand sliding beneath her clothes to grasp her breast, pressing her down with the weight of his inexorable kiss.

It was the heavy breathing of the wolfhound, animated by the scent of blood, which dragged them apart. Custis stood in the doorway, the leather lead of the animal wrapped tightly around his fist. Morgan stared his double, his own fingers grasping hard at Esma's waist and leaving smears of blood along her clothing.

"Lord Pendleton," she said with a half-smile. Custis met her eyes and growled.

"Take the animal outside." Morgan did not lift his hands from her body. His tone was even.

"You've brought your bitch inside our home," Custis spat, straining to keep the beast from lunging forward.

"Leave us, Custis," Morgan said again, voice rising. Esma watched as Morgan stared down his mirror image. His hands fell from her and he stepped forward.

At once Custis released the wolfhound from his restraint and in two strides it was upon them; Esma screamed and jumped back, pursued by slavering jaws and a lolling tongue. Its eyes were like cinders. There was nowhere for her to run beneath the contiguous rows of animal heads that watched, impassive. The hound smeared wet earth into her chest as it jumped and closed its teeth upon her arm with a boundless appetite for flesh. She bled, screamed, fell; Morgan bounded to the mantle and snatched up the pistol. Her eyes wide, her mouth open, she screaming soundlessly as the shot rang out. The wolfhound tore long cuts in Esma's arm as it jolted back, the bullet slicing through its neck. Blood poured from its mouth with a gurgled howling as it fell limp, breathing hard until it stilled completely in the thick afternoon light.

Esma's mind twisted with a blighted ringing that blurred the edges of her vision and numbed her. The gun had disappeared from Morgan's hand and instead the twins twisted in each other's arms until one knocked down his double. She stood, braced against the arm of a chair, as Morgan shoved his brother from the room.

At once he turned and grasped her again by the throat. He heard, in his mind, the delicious crunch of the rabbits' small bones as his hand tightened around her throat, pressing her back onto the oak paneling. Her wound bled freely, streaming down her forearm and falling in drops from her fingertips. Without disgust, with an almost tender gravity, he laced the fingers of his free hand with hers and lifted her arm, her blood smearing between their palms, pushing it back against the wall beside her cheek. She turned her head and brushed her lips against his chin with half-lidded eyes. Morgan felt the intemperate beat of her heart, her breathing that came ragged through her open mouth; the cry that echoed across the high ceiling he sensed only as quiver beneath his clenching palm as his teeth closed over the deep marks left by the animal. He bit and felt her blood run, covered his tongue with it, pressing more firmly against her as she howled.

"Morgan!" She cried, and he pushed his bloodstained mouth to hers, dragged his tongue along her teeth. He released her wrist and her nails dug into the soft flesh of his neck, twisting hard at his cravat, as he reached between them to drag open her trousers. She did not resist his prying fingers, smeared with her blood, as they pressed inside her roughly.

"One of my best hounds is dead because of you," he said, his red-lined teeth bared. She rolled her hips against his hand, swallowing thickly, her impeccable shirt collar dotted with darkening stains. He turned the knuckle of his thumb in insistent circles against her as her breath caught under his hand. "I should have let it tear out your pretty throat." His grip tightened. A strangled moan came from her lips.

"Drunken slut," he hissed, and his hands fell from her only to grasp tight at her hips and drag her clothes away; they were reflected in the glassy eyes of the dead beasts as Morgan mounted her against the wall. Speared, she gasped. She slid her hand between their shuddering bodies to touch herself but he snatched her roughly at the wrist and pulled her searching fingers away. She would not be so distracted from the object of his pleasure. He dragged her to his world of sensual immediacy, his eyes eaten up by a swollen pupil. He saw only his appetite. She trembled with every jagged movement of his hips. The air was chill, bright, sharp, and his heat branded her with every touch. He slid his arms beneath her knees and pulled her up, pinning her between his body and the wall.

At length he slowed, stopped, breathed; sweat slid down his temples, her hips bruising beneath his grip. Now she shifted and slapped him keenly across his cheek once, then again with the back of her hand, the jewels in her rings marking him, the blood that streaked down her arm staining his face. Morgan managed a few more impetuous thrusts inside her before he snarled and shrieked, pulling back to leave his runny spoor along her belly.


End file.
